


Talking with Ghosts

by orchid314



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Epistolary, Ficlet, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-26 09:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15660633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orchid314/pseuds/orchid314
Summary: My dearest Mother, May I come to you again? May I seek your blessing in my hour of need?





	Talking with Ghosts

My dearest Mother,

May I come to you again? May I seek your blessing in my hour of need? I must have written to you in one form or another, I think, ever since Afghanistan.

When I used to imagine my greatest fear, it was always of Sherlock dying ahead of me. (I will call him by his Christian name here on this page because–there are no more constraints, are there? I hope you will understand. I hope you would have understood, had you lived.) But now that it has happened, I discover that he prepared me for it long ago, in the mist of the Reichenbach Falls, on a Swiss mountainside one unexpected afternoon. Dosing me, as it were, with the pain at that moment so that I should not feel the full weight of his true death in a single blow. For one cannot mourn two deaths of the same person without laughing a little at the ridiculousness of life. At least that is what I tell myself in the daylight hours. 

I chided myself ceaselessly that year of 1891 and each year until he returned. That I had not done enough to save him from what I believed, mistakenly, to be his fate. But his departure this time was much simpler. Cleaner, if you will. An apoplectic stroke that carried him off at one glance, instead of blunting him with its force but still permitting him to live. There were no lingering symptoms, no being fed with a spoon, no changing of bedpans, above all no loss of that sublimely beautiful mind. He would under no circumstances have abided that. An insistent image has entered into my dreams these recent days. Of Sherlock dashing out the door to death, valise in hand, tossing a breezy farewell behind him, as he was wont to do when a case called him and I stayed home. I look up from my chair and smile, wishing him a good journey, but he is already gone. It gives a curious relief to see him this way, even though the image vanishes before I can fully grasp it and hold it in my mind.

I wonder what you would have made of him? In idle moments throughout the decades, I have envisaged the two of you together. You taking tea in the sitting room at Baker Street or else watching Sherlock at his work with the bees in the far garden. Just the two of you, talking. You would perhaps have been somewhat daunted by him at first, with your shy ways. But he would have done everything in his power to put you at ease and make you laugh. He was better at that than he believed.

Old Mr Empson's son found him on one of the garden paths. Lying on the manicured gravel, a little curled over on his side beneath the swaying leaves of a butterfly bush. When I saw his face, frozen lightly on that side by the apoplexy, I nodded to myself, "So this is how it ended. In this particular way. Of all the ways it could have happened. I always wondered how it would be." Sherlock left me strict instructions about "telling the bees" after his time had come, and we followed his commands to the best of our ability. We draped garlands of black crepe as a kind of mourning cloth around the tops of the hives and the bees stayed quiet for several days afterwards, grieving their attentive owner. Sherlock wanted no other funeral than that for himself. 

I must take my leave of you for the present. The Ainslies have arrived and they are to accompany me to London to sort through all manner of things in town. To decide what to do with the property at Baker Street and to go through the articles still stored there. To see Mycroft Holmes and the solicitor about the will. The Press are clamouring for statements and interviews, and someone apparently has circulated the idea of rushing a biography into print. Mycroft Holmes will surely put a quick end to that. 

And thus the rest of my life begins. I have felt you near, Mother, and I am grateful. Will you pray for safe passage for my friend, wherever he may be off to now? You would tell me that neither death, nor life, nor angels can separate us from those we love, but your intercession might help to lessen a bit the pain of this heart-wound. I thought I had prepared better for it. 

Your loving son,  
John


End file.
